Man Convicted In Bombings On Subway

By GEORGE JAMES

Published: March 8, 1996

Edward J. Leary, a computer analyst from suburban New Jersey who lost his job and carried his rage into New York City's subway, was convicted yesterday of firebombing two trains, as a Manhattan jury rejected his claim that antidepressants had driven him insane.

After deliberating six hours over two days, jurors found him guilty of attempted murder and assault in the explosion of two homemade gasoline bombs in December 1994, including one that turned a train in lower Manhattan into a furnace and left dozens of people injured, Mr. Leary among them.

But the jury acquitted him of attempted grand larceny, apparently unconvinced by the prosecution's theory that mounting debt in the 11 months after he lost his $87,000-a-year job led him to try to extort money from the city in return for stopping the bombings.

Mr. Leary's lawyers said the fact the jury did not accept the extortion theory undercut the prosecution's case and would be an important element of their appeal.

The defense never denied that Mr. Leary carried the two firebombs -- built of mayonnaise jars, kitchen timers, batteries and flashbulbs -- onto the two Manhattan trains. The centerpiece of Mr. Leary's defense was that he had been driven insane by an incompatible mix of mind-altering drugs, including Prozac, prescribed for his depression, so that he could not be held responsible.

After the verdict, Mr. Leary, 50, of Scotch Plains, N.J., glanced toward his wife, Marguerite Shaller, and nodded to her with a slight smile.

"I think my husband was nuts," said Ms. Shaller, who sat in the empty courtroom a long time after he had been led out in handcuffs. "I'm very shaken and I was prepared for the worst. The thing that bothers me is when they didn't find extortion, then what was the rationale?"

Some of the bombing victims said the verdict gave them a sense of relief but could not begin to restore their damaged lives.

"There was rejoicing in my heart when I heard the news," said Winfield Edey, 61, of Queens. "But we have to live with the constant reminders of what happened that day."

The jury in the seven-week trial had been given three choices by Justice Rena K. Uviller of State Supreme Court in Manhattan: to find Mr. Leary guilty, not guilty, or not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect.

One juror said the defense did not come close to persuading the panel that antidepressants had made him insane.

The juror, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the fact that Mr. Leary had fled the scene of the second bombing showed he was rational. The juror also said the prosecution's rebuttal witnesses had weakened the testimony of a defense psychiatrist. As for the attempted grand larceny charge, the juror agreed "that was the direction he may have been going," but said that the prosecution had not proved it beyond a reasonable doubt.

Each of the two counts of attempted murder carries a sentence of 8 1/3 to 25 years in prison. The sentence that Mr. Leary will receive on April 18 depends in part on Justice Uviller's interpretation of sentencing guidelines and her discretion, but District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau said the maximum could range from 35 to 105 years.

Coming less than two years after the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993, the firebombing in a crowded downtown No. 4 train stopped at the Fulton Street station in Manhattan's financial district on Dec. 21, 1994, caused new anxiety in an already shaken city.

The first bomb was hardly noticed. It went off on Dec. 15, 1994, on a No. 3 train stopped at 145th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. Two teen-age students were injured, and investigators at first thought one of them had been carrying the device in a backpack.

But on Dec. 21, at 1:35 P.M., the second device went off in the sixth car of the No. 4 train, which was crammed with people returning to work from lunch and Christmas shopping. Some passengers heard a pop, others a boom, others a loud bang. Flames shot up to the ceiling, incinerated subway advertisements and moved like a wall the length of the car, engulfing Christmas packages, briefcases and people.

Passengers scrambled to the doors in panic, stepping over those who had fallen in the crush or crawling on their hands and knees as they felt the intense heat. Once outside on a platform filling with smoke, they rolled around or patted themselves and others to put out the flames.

Forty-eight people were injured, 14 seriously. Mr. Leary was one of them, with his lower extremities burned severely. But unlike the others who wandered in a daze -- some still thinking they had to get back to work, many not yet fully comprehending the extent of their injuries -- Mr. Leary took another subway to Brooklyn.

Once he reached the Clark Street station in Brooklyn, though, his pain had become intense and he asked a police officer to call an ambulance.

At first, he denied involvement in the bombings, but after he hired a new team of lawyers, Ira London and Robert Fogelnest, the strategy changed. They acknowledged his role but said that he was not thinking clearly because of the mix of drugs he had been prescribed by a psychopharmacologist whose advertisement he saw in The Village Voice.

At the trial, the defense depicted Mr. Leary as a pathetic figure who had begun his descent into despair with the death of relatives and the knowledge that his adopted son had a learning disability; by the time he was dismissed from his job at Merrill Lynch in January 1994, he was in a full-blown depression, defense lawyers said.

A major witness for the defense, Dr. Joseph DiGiacomo, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, testified that the combination of the antidepressant drugs Prozac and Effexor, with an anti-anxiety drug Buspar and an antibiotic Biaxin had put Mr. Leary into a state of substance intoxification that caused him to drift in and out of a dreamlike state starting in the summer of 1994, and left him not responsible for his actions.

But prosecution experts disputed Dr. DiGiacomo's views, testifying that they were only a theory.

And the prosecutors, Peter Casolaro and David Stampley, painted another portrait. Feeling that he had lost his job because of office politics, Mr. Leary allowed his anger and frustration to fester, they said. It was not the drugs but a vicious streak in his personality that caused him to take revenge on innocent people, like any deranged employee who reacts violently in a post office or a restaurant, Mr. Casolaro argued.

The prosecutors said that as Mr. Leary's debts mounted, he devised a plan to extort money from the city. But the defense argued that Mr. Leary was not desperate; he still had $400,000 in assets, including three apartments in Brooklyn and a vacation home.

Mention of extorting money was found in 10 pages of scrawled notes found in Mr. Leary's home, along with bomb parts. The notes included a catalogue of fantastic weapons like a television-guided missile.

Photo: Edward J. Leary in a Manhattan courtroom yesterday after he was found guilty of two subway bombings. (Pool photo by Helayne Seidman) (pg. B4)